Utilities companies have a significant challenge with outages, which may be caused by trees and other objects falling on overhead power lines. A significant part of the preventive maintenance budget is targeted to clearing trees. Utilities spend a significant amount of time trying to locate the exact location of tree damage that is causing a particular outage. These issues are both a financial burden and reduce the quality of service provided by utilities. Similar challenges exist with several other asset management disciplines like managing road networks, oil pipe networks, rail networks, etc., where the assessing the condition of the infrastructure and detecting potential hazards is critical to the safe and continuous operation of these infrastructures
Many utilities store the location of their power lines, for example, in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). However utilities today use ad hoc manual techniques to assess where to dispatch crews, e.g., for tree trimming activity.